Tuesday, November 8, 2011

While I haven't been writing in my blog, I HAVE been writing. I'm over 20000 words into my NaNoWriMo piece and finding myself struggling with certain genre vs character issues. Big Guy has been reading over my work and feels that it's well written over all. I still struggle with being descriptive and not rushing through scenes, so I'm erring on the side of overly descriptive. I can always go back and cut things, I feel. It's harder to add.

However, my book is not some fluff piece of happily-ever-after. The main character is a man (my first big struggle) and the female lead has dealt with some pretty tough things. You have a man coming specifically to woo a queen. This queen has remerged to run a kingdom after nearly a century. She was enslaved and then in hiding, so her view of the world is definitely different. It's harder and grittier. Also, she's not quite the same noblewoman as her peers. She deals with things differently, she perceives things differently, and she reacts to situations differently.

The problem comes when I finally have the characters "get together" in the novel. She finally acquiesces to their connection... It's important, I feel, to show how fully she has given to him. Big Guy does not necessarily agree, thinking that sex, for the most part, should not be part of a true fantasy setting. I think a large part of it depends on the world created. Is it a Disney-fantasy world with gender neutrality and happily-ever-after? In that case, good god no sex please. Or are we dealing with the seamier side of life? And perhaps that's where my descriptions are falling down... This is a dirty place. Slaves are not treated well, rapes and violence happen... Power is acheived through might, whether it's magical might, physical might, or political might. Bad guys aren't just mustache twirling villains... They are evil personified. They go out and kill kittens because they can...

There doesn't seem to be a clear answer on how to handle this though. I consulted the great Google machine, but finding an answer when sex and fantasy are involved is rather disturbing. At this point, I'm just going to push through to 50,000 and worry about the revision and sex afterward.